Watch countries climb the energy ladder from poverty to abundance
Oooh, animation for data nerds 🍿
Lots of reactions to my recent post on the super-tight correlation between electricity and income. My point: the entire lower right quadrant is empty, showing that high-income low-energy countries literally do not exist.
So if we want countries to get richer (of course we do), they will need a lot more energy. Especially those below 1000 kWh per capita.
(If you want to complain about my use of logged axes or explain that electricity ≠ energy, please don’t. I’ve heard it all before.)
One of the best questions I got was about time trends. What does it look like for individual countries as they move up the energy ladder? Fortunately, the great people over at Our World in Data have a handy animation feature to show time series for 1990-2022. Here are some trends (h/t Hamna Tariq) I found fascinating.
1. The Climbers
We can watch Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and South Korea get richer as they use more electricity — and vice versa. Boom!
2. The Strugglers
Here are Burundi, Haiti, Nigeria, El Salvador, and Lebanon. They’re not going up the ladder and in some years headed the wrong way.
3. Meta global trends with country income groups
Here are all countries using the World Bank’s four income groups. This one is really telling IMO.
The high-income countries are still getting richer but not using a whole lot more energy. This is very much to be expected as the utility of additional electricity really levels off once you hit a certain range (which depends on the characteristics of each economy but on average probably around 10,000 kWh).
Both middle-income groups are racing up the ladder. You love to see it. This is economic growth and transformation.
Low-income countries are mostly stuck. Ugh. This illustrates our principal challenge for the next two decades: unlocking investment so everyone can enjoy the bounty of energy abundance.
You too can play around with the country choices. Let me know if you find anything interesting.
Excellent work Todd--thanks for sharing.
On the "principal challenge": I used to think that we should be helping low income countries more. But I have come to realize that that belief is paternalist and racist. Unless and until they want to help themselves by reforming their institutions and cultures, we ought to let them live the way they want to live. That's respecting their autonomy. It's time to stop pumping money into corrupt leaders' Swiss bank accounts.